Chick Chalmers (1948-98) was born in Edinburgh and educated at George Heriot's School. He has close links with Orkney. His grandmother, on his mother's side, was a Shearer; and on his father's side he is descended from the Chalmers family of Kirkwall. He spent three months in the islands during the winter of 1974/5, taking many of these photographs and returned in the early summer of 1976 with the aid of a Greater London Arts Association Visual Arts Award.

Chick was a graduate in photography from the Polytechnic of Central London, specialising in documentary photography. In his final year he made a body of work on Orkney which was toured as an exhibition by the London photography collective Camerawork. In 1980 he was awarded a Scottish Arts Council grant as part of an exchange to go to the States to photograph, touring almost every state in an ancient VW camper van. He returned with a remarkable body of work which was exhibited at Stills gallery in 1982. He began teaching at what is now Napier University, Edinburgh in 1979 and also taught at Stevenson College in the last two years of his life.